Spoken from the Heart (3 page)

He finally arrived home in January of 1946. Along with his meager gear, he carried with him eight tiny two-by-three-inch photos from Nordhausen, Germany, the site of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Mother kept them along with some letters in an old latch-top cigar box. As a child, I used to take them out one by one and examine them, holding them up to the light to study the tiny images frozen in time by the camera's lens, trying to decipher them. They were pictures of row upon row of bodies of the dead, some bloated, some so skeletal that they were little more than bones with the last remnants of skin stretched over them, stark white, sunken torsos in which you could count every rib. There were three separate rows of bodies, some naked, some still wearing the rough striped pants and shirts that the Nazis had forced upon them. A few were covered, looking like hastily wrapped mummies in half decay. The rows of human beings stretched out beyond the buildings. My dad had written on the back of one of the photos how the lines of corpses continued well beyond "the second white building." On another photo, showing the grotesque contorted final death grips of naked men, he wrote, after a long explanation, "Tear it up if you wish." But no one ever could, ever did, ever wanted to. He had photos too of a baby and a small child alongside, the child's arm reaching out in one last, futile effort to cover and to comfort the baby. Beside them are the bare legs of a horribly shrunken young man. Starvation had consumed his legs to the point of nothingness. In one last photo, the bodies seem to stretch as far as the eye or camera could see. There were, I now know, about five thousand of them.

Daddy's overall unit, the 104th, the Timberwolves, had liberated Nordhausen. His battalion had fought its way into the heavily fortified German town. He was among the early wave of troops to enter the camp, sent to render aid and to witness what had happened at Mittelbau-Dora. In the photos, you can see clusters of GIs, their feet in the same dirty, scarred combat boots that most of them had worn since Normandy, standing at silent attention beside the field of corpses. Barely one thousand prisoners were alive when they arrived. A plea had gone out for every Army medic in the region to come to the camp to treat anyone who might have survived. Many of the living were hiding among the dead or were too weak even to roll away from those who had died next to them. They lay amid disease and human waste, sometimes covered with dust from a bombing. Three or four living men had spent almost a week trapped under decaying bodies in a bomb crater. Some of the newly freed tried with their last remaining strength to salute their liberators. The American GIs dropped their heads into their hands and wept.

My father carried these photos home, most of them taken by one of his unit buddies. He wrote on the back of one small rectangle that he thought the photo would look different, but the camera lens had been too small to capture the enormity of the scene. Yet Daddy did not talk about Nordhausen. Once every year or two, when the three of us would open the box of photos, he could not bring himself to say a single word. Not long after he returned, Daddy told my mother that while inside the camp he had come upon an American Army nurse wielding a shovel in her hand. Before her stood a group of captured German Army officers. She thrust the shovel toward one man and said, "Dig." He pulled himself up straight and said, "No, I am an officer," and she lifted the shovel, whacked him across the bottom, and again said, "Dig." The officer took the shovel and started to dig. Each scoop of earth widened the space to bury the dead.

I was born in November, just over nine months after Daddy returned home, and to me, growing up, the war was like ancient history, but to him, it must have been very fresh and raw.

My dad came home to El Paso, but my parents didn't stay there long. Before the war, my father had worked for Universal CIT Credit Corporation, a loan company that, among other things, sold auto financing to people who bought cars. Today banks and car manufacturers handle auto financing, but in those postwar years people primarily applied to Universal CIT or another company like it. My father had started out in the Amarillo office and then moved to El Paso to be the district manager, but during the war one of his good friends had been promoted to run the El Paso office. Daddy had no wish to take away his job. The company offered Daddy several other posts, and he picked district manager for Midland. To sweeten the deal, CIT threw in a company car for him to drive.

Across the United States in 1946, there were thousands of towns like Midland and hundreds of thousands of men like my father. Midland became a boomtown because of the oil, but there are towns all over the country--auto towns in Michigan, steel towns in Pennsylvania or Ohio, textile towns in the Carolinas, other industry towns in other states--where veterans came back and settled to live their lives and make their homes. They put the war behind them, went to work, and built the economy. As kids, we knew small parts of their stories. We heard the adults talk in hushed sentences about neighborhood women whose first husbands had died in the war and who were now married to someone else. I had a couple of friends whose dads had been killed overseas, so they no longer had their dad, they had whomever their mother married next. That was the man who raised them, and most kids called him "Dad." Their dads from the war were gone. Many of my parents' best friends had war stories. Johnny Hackney, who owned Johnny's Bar-B-Q, had fought in the Pacific. Charlie White, who started out renting the house behind Mother and Daddy's, had contracted tuberculosis in a training camp during the war. Instead of going overseas, he was shipped to a sanitarium and his first wife left him. He met his second wife, Mary, when he came to Midland to work as an accountant for the Shell Oil Company.

There were families like the Hackneys or the Whites on almost every block, yet most people rarely mentioned the war. Midland had American Legion posts and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, but they blended in with the Kiwanis clubs and the Elks. The adults I knew did not sit around trading stories of the war, of buddies who had been shot, friends who never came home, of men blown to bits by the side of the road, of the nights they were afraid to go to sleep because they might freeze to death in the bitter snows and cold, or of the emaciated Jews in the camps, many hiding among corpses in their rough, striped clothes, and the overwhelming stench of human dead. Only later would I learn that those were the things so many of them had seen.

Instead, they put the war years behind them and looked forward. I think too that my father seldom spoke of those years because he wanted to shield me. He didn't want me to know, and didn't want to admit to himself, how horrible man could be. He could manage the horrors if he did not examine them, did not dwell on them, if he did not lift the lid of that cigar box too many times to recall what lay within. In Midland, where the sky arced over us in one enormous dome of blistering blue and where people doggedly imported acres of elm seedlings and chinaberry trees to plant the green ribbons of shade that lined their streets at the edge of the desert, we were quite literally an ocean and almost a continent removed. All those years, though, Daddy kept those photos tucked away. He might not wish to remember, but neither would he ever allow himself to forget.

In November of 2002, I went to a luncheon in Prague during one of the NATO summits, and I was seated next to a Czech Holocaust survivor. Over the china plates and clinking crystal, with jacketed waiters hovering near our half-eaten meals, we started talking, and I told him that my father had helped to liberate one of the camps but that he had never actually talked about it. And this man, Arno Lustig, paused and looked at me and said, "Well, I was in one of the camps, and I never talked about it to my kids either. I never told them about it." Like my father, he added, he had wanted to shelter his own children from what he had seen and from all that he knew.

The El Paso that my parents left was a city of over one hundred thousand people. It had tall brick, quarried stone skyscrapers and crowded downtown blocks. The National Bank of El Paso building covered a full city corner and climbed seven stories into the sky. Chubby streetcars clanged up and down the avenues. By comparison, Midland was a sleepy backwater, a cattle drive and railway town bent on growing beyond itself. My father saw something in it and bet on Midland. I don't know if he had heard about the oil strikes when he picked Midland or if he simply wanted to be closer to his mother, in Lubbock. Once my father chose Midland, there was no turning back. However, Harold and Jenna Welch didn't stay put. They had lived in three homes before the first one that I remember, on Estes Avenue. Like all Midland houses, it was a low one-story. Land was abundant, and the swirling desert winds and the tornadoes that periodically threatened to rip past made going up impractical. If you were wealthier, you just had a longer house.

Their first home was a room at the Crawford Hotel. Almost everyone who moved to Midland moved into the Crawford or the slightly fancier Scharbauer Hotel, which had been built by one of the area's early ranching families. The Scharbauer's lobby was where cowboys and roughnecks and geologists tramped in and out looking for jobs and where oil landmen tried to corral ranchers into leasing them the mineral rights to their grazing acres in the hope of striking black gold. My mother was already pregnant when they arrived, and Daddy quickly found a little house on North Loraine, right at the edge of downtown, and put down a deposit. The owner had left behind some furniture and a puppy from a new litter. They named the dog Bully because he was the bully of the lot, and Bully lasted longer than the house. By the time I was two, we had moved over to a house on Estes Avenue. We would live in almost every house on that block before I turned seven.

My father's office was only a few blocks away, and he drove his company car to work each morning. Mother walked to the grocery or into town, although, in 1946, Midland didn't have much of a downtown. The city's first real skyscraper, finished in 1929 by the former Montana senator T. S. Hogan, had been promptly dubbed Hogan's Folly. It was a towering creation of glass windows and intricately carved sandstone, with a top that looked like the points in a king's crown. When the building opened, the town celebrated for a week with barbecues, rodeos, concerts, fireworks, speeches, aerial acts, and a formal dance with an orchestra in the Crystal Ballroom at the Scharbauer Hotel. Within five years, barely 10 percent of the offices had been leased, and the building was used mostly to store grain and hay, one of the most expensive and ornate silos ever built.

My father had the same job that he'd had before the war, but now his territory ran east and south and west, spanning more than one hundred miles in each direction. From Midland, it stretched east to Abilene, south to San Angelo and Fort Stockton, and west to Pecos and Monahans. And it covered a swath of small towns in between, towns with names like Notrees, Texon, and Iraan. Daddy regularly got behind the wheel and made the three-, four-, and five-hour drives to call on car dealers or customers in the region. He knew every dealer in every small town. Occasionally, he took me with him, my legs growing hot and prickly from the heat that rose in glistening waves from the road. Mostly, though, he went alone, and I would cry when his car pulled away from the curb. Today, West Texas salesmen still ply the same routes, this time selling medical devices and high-tech equipment across that vast triangle of land.

My mother stayed home and waged her own constant battle with the land right outside our door. Midland sits at the bottom of the High Plains, nearly three thousand feet above sea level. When the first settlers drove their wagons across it, they found a rich plateau of shimmering grasslands; "higher than a horse" is how some of them described the grass. Buffalo grazed along its wide stretches and wallowed in its dips, where the hard, fast rains would collect and swell into muddy bottoms. On the grasslands, the Comanche Indians chased the buffalo and then battled the settlers. But the settlers kept coming. Train tracks were laid. The new arrivals drove in cattle from the east and set up ranching. And then they plowed the ground. The land was plowed all the way from Minnesota to Texas. And then the drought came. Without rain, nothing would grow in the soil, and when the winds raced out of Canada and down through the plains, the soil blew, acres and acres of topsoil, more soil in one single storm back in the 1930s than was dug out of the entire Panama Canal, until there was nothing left except the hard, dry land underneath.